You’re Not “Letting People Go”—You're Firing Them
Getting past the euphemisms - this is what “performance management” looks like from the manager chair.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I’m Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers and tactical leadership advice.
Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you’d like to read more, I’d love you to consider becoming a paid member!
This is a big one. It will likely be personal to many of you. So, as the young people like to say, trigger warning.
Here’s my personal context. I worked at Amazon for a bit over 12 years, always in management positions. Early on I managed a single team of 5-10 people. Over time, my team sizes increased to over 150 people, with sometimes multiple layers of management (a junior manager reporting to a manager reporting to a senior manager reporting to me) in my org.
I had to personally fire (or they quit while I was in the process of firing them) somewhere around 15 people, or a bit more than one per year. Usually that was someone reporting to me, but sometimes I had to help a junior manager do their job. I was closely involved with everyone fired in my organization, so I actively participated in the firing process for at least 50+ people. Not to mention the tangential experience I had working with peers firing other employees, and a few peers getting fired themselves.
I use the term firing on purpose. Many people use other softened corporate terms, such as laying off, letting go, dismissing an employee, terminating employment, and the like. I like the term firing, because it sounds harsh. And this is a harsh process. It doesn’t become better for anyone to say that we’re going to have to “let you go.” They don’t want to go. So you’re not letting them go. You’re kicking them out of the door.
It used to be that Amazon was abnormal for firing people regularly. They had annual quotas for rating people poorly, and firing them (both goals ranging from around 5-10% a year, depending on the year). I remember many other tech companies proudly declaring that they didn’t have quotas. But after the many rounds of layoffs across the sector recently, I don’t think any large company is innocent.
I’m going to tell some stories of people being fired. Because of the intense personal nature of each of these stories, I’m going to be closely following my anecdote policy. It’s cute to occasionally leak a private story when I’m bragging about someone being a top performer. “Oh gosh Dave, was that me?! Yay!” Not cute when the story is about one of the worst times in someone’s life.
The official names, timing, and processes regularly change at Amazon, so I’ll keep some things vague as they really don’t matter. It does matter (a little) that the general cycle at Amazon for ratings and firing is April to April, so that context is built into my timelines. That cycle is called OLR (organization & leadership review) within Amazon.
One more thing, which is more of a defensive statement on my part. I’m explaining how things did happen in the past, how things happen now, and how they’re likely to continue happening in the future. I’m providing information, and a bit of education.
In any of these stories, I could have done something differently, or I may have even been a different person in the story, considering my anecdote policy. I’m not telling these stories because they were perfectly executed. Because life certainly isn’t perfect.
Early May
Isabel knocked on my office door for her weekly one-on-one. She was one of the development managers reporting to me.
“A few moments!” I yelled at the door.
I unpaused my YouTube video and watched the last 25 seconds of a Veritasium video. Whew, I hate to leave videos half-watched.
“Come in!” I yelled.
Isabel came in and sat in my guest chair.
“Sorry for the delay; I had a quick email to finish. What do you have for me today?” I asked.
“Well, I wanted you to know that one of my engineers has been underperforming for a while.” Isabel said. “I think I’m going to enter him into formal coaching.”
I nodded and didn’t otherwise show a reaction. I did that on purpose. As a relatively junior manager, she was surely nervous about this management issue. I certainly didn’t want to make it more nerve-wracking by responding emotionally.
“Who are we talking about here?” I asked. Not too long ago we’d completed OLR (our ratings and rankings process), so I was familiar with most of the engineers in my organization.
“Shaul,” she said. “He seems to be lacking motivation. His code is sloppier. He’s missing most of his sprint deadlines. His teammates keep complaining to me about him.”
That’s a key thing. When you see someone not doing great, you wonder if you’re just missing something. But when their teammates complain, you can be more confident that there’s something going on.
“Ok, please let HR know that you’d like to give him official coaching,” I said, “And please forward to me any formal feedback you end up sending him.”
I figured that HR would help Isabel with the formal process, but I wanted to audit to ensure that Shaul received clear feedback.
Late May
Around a week later, I received an email from Isabel, which read as follows.
“Shaul, as we talked about in your one-on-one today, we’re entering you into formal coaching. As we have talked about for the last four weeks, the quality of your code has been below expectations, and you have repeatedly missed the estimates you and your team provided for your assigned sprint tasks. We will spend time each week during your one-on-one talking about your progress.”
That seemed like a reasonable start to the coaching process.
A few days later, I met with my manager, Rachel, regarding underperformers.
Rachel smiled as I entered her office.
“Hey Dave! How have things been?” she said enthusiastically.
After some small talk, we got down to business.
“I know the OLR cycle just ended a bit over a month ago, but I want to make sure we’re keeping an eye on our unregretted numbers. The end of the year will be here before you know it.” she said. “Do you have the start of any performance management going on?”
I nodded. “Yes, my management team has been looking into it already. We’ve already talked to HR about at least one engineer.”
First, unregretted attrition is the term at Amazon for people you kick out of the company. You don’t regret them leaving the company. Second, this is the first of the political lessons to think about. In almost all roles, you don’t want your manager to pay attention to your area. Why? Because you promote people who make your life easy, and you look closely at the performance of people who make your life hard.
How do you make them relax and look at your peers instead of you? You make sure you broadcast to your manager that you absolutely are on the ball, thinking ahead, and confidently doing exactly what they need.
Rachel smiled again. “Excellent! That’s a relief.”
Why is it a relief for Rachel? Because her manager is doing the same thing. Everyone with an organization of over 50 people has unregretted attrition goals to hit, and unlike most goals, there is basically no flexibility. As they say, shit flows downhill. If you want to be a manager at Amazon, one of your responsibilities is to help implement their firing processes. Of course this is now true at most companies.
